From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [54]
“This is the last time I’m comin up. You can either move or not, its okay. When a man changes his life, he has to change it all. He cant keep nothin that reminds him of the old life, or it doesnt work. If I kept comin up here, I’d get dissatisfied with this transfer and I’d try to change it. I dont aim to do that, or let anybody know I want to do it.
“So its up to you,” he said.
“I cant go, Bobbie,” the girl said, not moving, no change in her voice, still from the chair as she had been before.
“Okay,” he said. “Then I’ll be leavin. I’ve seen lots of guys shacked up in Wahiawa. They have a good time. Them and their wahines have parties together and go out together, movies and bars. All like that. The girls aint alone. Not any more,” he said, “than any human being is always alone.”
“What happens to them when the soldiers leave?” she said. Her eyes were looking off at the hilltop trees.
“I dont know. And I dont give a good goddam. They probly git other soljers. I’ll be leavin.”
When he came back out he carried the sneaks and the whiskey, the nearly full one and the nearly empty one, rolled up in the trunks, all the things he had owned here, all that he was taking with him. The little that they were, they had been deposited here as security for a pass of entrance, collateral for the loan of a life that existed off the Post, and in taking them away he had revoked his claim.
Violet was still sitting in the same unchanged position, and he made himself grin at her, drawing his lips back tautly across his teeth. But the girl did not see it, or notice him. He walked down the steps and around the corner of the house.
Her voice followed him around the corner. “Goodby, Bobbie.”
Prew grinned again. “Aloha nui oe,” he called back, playing the role out to the end, with a strong sense of the dramatic.
As he crested the little hill he did not look back, but he could feel through the back of his neck that she was standing in the door, leaning against the jamb, one hand propped against the other side as if barring the door to a salesman. He walked on toward the intersection, never looking back, seeing in his mind the fine tragic picture his figure disappearing down the hill must make, as if it were himself standing back there in the door. And the strange thing was he had never loved her more than at this moment, because at that moment she had become himself.
But thats not love, he thought, thats not what she wants, nor what any of them want, they do not want you to find yourself in them, they want instead that you should lose yourself in them. And yet, he thought, they are always trying to find themselves in you. What a wonderful actor you would have made, Prewitt, he told himself.
It was only when he was below the hill that he could end the role and stop, turning to look back, allowing himself to feel the loss.
And it seemed to him then that every human was always looking for himself, in bars, in railway trains, in offices, in mirrors, in love, especially in love, for the self of him that is there, someplace, in every other human. Love was not to give oneself, but find oneself, describe oneself. And that the whole conception had been written wrong. Because the only part of any man that he can ever touch or understand is that part of himself he recognizes in him. And that he is always looking for the way in which he can escape his sealed bee cell and reach the other airtight cells with which he is connected in the waxy comb.
And the only way that he had ever found, the only code, the only language, by which he could speak and be heard by other men, could communicate himself, was with a bugle. If you had a bugle here, he told himself, you could speak to her and be understood, you could play Fatigue Call for her, with its tiredness, its heavy belly going out to sweep somebody else’s streets when it would rather stay at home and sleep, she would understand it then.
But you havent got a bugle, himself said, not here nor any other place. Your tongue has been ripped